Since I have limited yarn, I eliminated sleeves from this third sweater adventure when my swatching showed me how much yarn I’d need to make a given amount of fabric. And since this vest, unlike the Hillhead Slipover I recently completed, will open in the front, I need to decide on a stitch pattern to use for the front bands as well as around the armholes and on the bottom edge.

Having done a U-neck on the first sweater adventure and a crew/round neck on the second, I thought I’d like a V-neck on my vest. But since it is a vest, I was hoping to make the V a bit longer (or deeper) by doing its shaping every six rows rather than every four. (I think doing the shaping every eight rows would wind up deeper than I’d like.)

Initial Design

One easy way to work with limited yarn is to knit garments from the top-down. You can then use nearly every bit of yarn, stopping the sleeves early to get a bit more body length, cropping the body to allow three-quarter or possibly full-length sleeves, or maximizing body length by eliminating sleeves altogether, which is my strategy for this third sweater adventure.

Not steeking the center front means I’ll work the fronts and back flat, and as I hate seaming hand-knits, I didn’t see any reason to not work the fronts and back seamlessly below the underarms. I work across one front, move directly into and across the back, then directly into the other front. Turn, and repeat.

And because I’m somewhat symmetry-obsessed, whatever non-rolling stitch pattern I use for the edgings has to either have no left-right directionality at all or be reversible on the left and right front and armhole bands.

Finding a Band Stitch Pattern

I pulled out my Barbara Walker stitch dictionaries and paged through, looking for something reasonably easy to do. If it were reversible, that would be a bonus, since the fronts of cardigans, sleeved or sleeveless, flop open on occasion.

Oh, yes, I had already decided to forego buttons, exactly as I did on my Brae Cardigan, because I don’t really ever see myself wanting to button this garment. At best I might put a sweater keeper or a shawl pin through the front bands at the bottom of the V-neck.

Swatching Band Stitch Patterns

I saw several patterns I liked, then in reviewing them, I focused first on the “Broad Spiral Rib,” found on page 48 of her first treasury. I charted her instructions, then made a mirror-image version of it.

I picked two more of my undesirable Hawthorne colorway samples to make the swatch. The Broad Spiral Rib uses 1/1 cables to make the knit ribs run diagonally across the width of the ribbing. I found them a little fiddly to work, though it got easier when I switched to her method of doing what she calls a “right twist” and a “left twist.” But still, with the highly patterned dyeing style of the yarn, the appearance of the project yarn would hide to a greater or lesser degree the interest of the stitch pattern.

So I went to my second choice, “Mistake-Stitch Ribbing” on page 40 of the first treasury. This well-known pattern is good old 2×2 ribbing but worked on one less stitch than it should be. Since 2×2 ribbing is “K2, P2” across, it has a multiple of 4 stitches. But Mistake-Stitch Rib needs a multiple of 4 plus 3, so that you end the last stitch repeat with P1 instead of P2. When you work “K2, P2 across, ending K2, P1” for every row, you get an interesting texture that’s reversible (though naturally the pattern is shifted over by half its width on the two sides of the fabric).

So I cast on 30 sts, working the first 7 and last 7 in Mistake-Stitch Rib and the remaining sts in the center in stockinette. This swatch emulated the situation of the combined fronts and back once I’d joined the three pieces below the underarm.

About ten rows in, I realized the left and right edges of the swatch were not mirror-image of each other. That’s no good, at least for my preferences.

Then I adjusted my chart, drawing the symbols at the left edge in the opposite order as those on the right edge. Now I had a purl column against the central stockinette on both edges, and the edges of the swatch were mirror-image. The switch is obvious in the picture above if you trace the visible knit column up the left edge of the swatch, noting where it shifts slightly to the right.

I then wondered if a seven-stitch-wide band would be enough to overcome stockinette’s inherent curl, especially down the vest’s long front edges, so I converted four sts at each end of the stockinette center section to Mistake-Stitch Rib, as shown in the top eighteen rows in the pic above. Even if seven sts would be enough to counteract the roll, I decided I liked the bolder look of eleven sts of Mistake-Stitch Rib.

My front bands will therefore be eleven stitches of Mistake-Stitch Rib, with the pattern set up to give me mirror-image edges down the center of the vest. I’ll stick with seven sts of Mistake-Stitch Rib along the vertical edges of the armholes, since their shorter heights make them less prone to rolling even with a narrower edging.

Symmetrical, Mirror-Image Mistake-Stitch Ribbing

multiple of 4 + 1
Row 1: * K2, P2, rep from *, end K1
Row 2: *P2, K2, rep from *, end P1
Rep rows 1–2